Service frameworks and toolkits: Making design artefacts actionable
In 2015 Westpac Bank, partnering with Meld Studios, embarked on a journey to understand what great service looks like in their eyes of their increasingly digital customers. The aim was to create a customer-centric executable vision that could be used and applied across the entire bank.
The outcome was a service vision framework and toolkit that contains a set of a set of actionable service principles and guidelines distilled from customer insights that, when creating a new service or improving a current service, helps teams within Westpac identify opportunities to create seamless joined-up customer experiences that make the most of every engagement channel, and help measure whether their ideas will deliver on the desired customer experience. It helps teams place their ideas within the broader service system allowing them to see its impact on other connected services, and evolve these ideas using a customer-centred approach.
But the journey to get there was anything but smooth. The high-level brief brought the challenge of managing stakeholders through the ambiguous nature of what was being created. Being the first time many of the stakeholders had been involved in taking a designerly customer-centred approach to end-to-end service strategy, stakeholder trust in the process had to be built. Finally, a vision for the bank meant creating alignment between multiple senior stakeholders each with their own priorities and challenges.
We will share
- The features of and benefits of service frameworks and the supporting toolkits for the organisation
- The ‘how to’ of creating actionable design artefacts, the learnings from experience working on multiple service frameworks
- How to involve stakeholders on the journey, gain alignment and build trust in the design process and manage through the periods of ambiguity
- How to make sure the design artefacts you create are useful to designers and non-designers alike